Lou Ferrigno: My Late-Night Hookup with The Incredible Hulk

 

When I was living in West Hollywood, I worked part-time as an editorial assistant on Muscle and Fitness.  

It wasn't as much fun as it sounds.  The articles were often heterosexist, we featured female bodybuilders as often as male, and  I didn't get to actually watch many photo shoots.

But I did get to talk to some bodybuilders, including Lou Ferrigno: Mr. America, Mr. Universe, Hercules, and The Incredible Hulk

He was most famous for The Incredible Hulk, about ten years before.  I never watched, but I knew the basic premise: It starred Bill Bixby as David Banner (changed from the Marvel comics' Bruce, which the network censored deemed too gay).  After the death of his wife, of course, he experiments with human strength, and Jekyl-Hydes himself into Ferrigno's green-skinned man-mountain: "Don't get me angry.  You wouldn't like me when I'm angry." 

One day Ferrigno came in with Bill Bixby.  I thought they looked like a gay couple.

A few days later, he came in by himself for a photo shoot.

"Hi, Mr. Ferrigno." I called.  "Where's Bill?"

"I left him home, chained up in the basement."

"Can I come take a look?"

He grinned, clapped a huge hand on my back, and walked on.

Asking around, I was told: "Ferrigno is straight, but he won't say no to a late-night blow job."

I kept a lookout for Ferrigno's next appearance.  It came near Halloween, when I was working reception, a part of the job I hated.

"You got a promotion, I see," he said with a cruisy smile.

"I'm a jack of all trades around here, but usually I'm in editorial."

"Then be sure to spell my name right."

"Only if you spell mine right.  I'd better write it down for you."

He didn't object, so I wrote it on a piece of paper.  "And my phone number, in case you have any questions."

"Good idea.  I might have questions."

He put the number in his pocket and went off to his appointment.  About half an hour later, he came through the lobby again and stopped at my desk.  "Do you like ____?"

I didn't understand his deaf accent (Ferrigno has 80% hearing loss).  "Mexican food?"  Was he asking me out?  "Sure.  What time...."

Then someone else came in, and he mouthed "I'll call you," and left.

At least that's what I think he said.

I told all my friends that I had a date with Lou Ferrigno, and waited for his call.

It never came, so I forgot about it-- I was giving my phone number to a lot of people at the time.

Then one night in  January shortly after Alan the Pentecostal Porn Star and I broke up, I was at home, watching tv and doing some reading for my seminar in Dante at USC, when Lou knocked on my door!

"Is this a good time?" he asked.

My one-room apartment was a mess -- unmade bed, dinner dishes out, books and papers everywhere.  Besides, I was in my bathrobe, and I hadn't brushed my teeth since dinner. But who's going to say no?

He collapsed onto the bed.  "Boy, I'm tired.  I could use a nap."

"Ok, let's take a nap."

I climbed onto the bed next to him, and he wrapped a huge arm around me.  I moved up and started unbuttoning his shirt and kissing his chest.

More after the break. Caution: Explicit

Stephen Louis Grush: from Pericles to Peter's militia, with lots of gay roles and a few dicks in between

 Stephen Louis Grush grew up in New Orleans, and graduated from Roosevelt University in Chicago with a BFA in Theater. He has over 30 credits on the IMDB, often in projects that emphasize gay subtexts, or texts.

In Catch Hell (2014), two toughs (Stephen Louis Grush, Ian Barford) kidnap a Hollywood actor (Ryan Philippe) with the intent of torturing and killing him.  They do a lot of torturing, but Junior (Stephen) also falls in love with him.

Ryan Phillippe's butt as Junior prepares to...you know.

Stephen's butt and dick, as they strugle.

In Gracepoint (2014), Stephen plays a plumber's apprentice who may be gay, accused of murdering a small boy.

More Grush after the break. Caution: explicit.

"Decline and Fall": Theology student sent down for immorality in 1930s Oxford, with Oxfordian dicks and bums

 

After Brideshead Revisited appeared on television in 1982, everyone thought that Evelyn Waugh was a gay writer, and started buying up the original novel from 1945, as well as his other novels, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies.  Turns out that he was straight-ish, regretted the gay romances of his Oxford years, and thought of same-sex love as decadent and immoral, or at best adolescent experimentation that you give up once you are old enough for the "real love" of a woman.   So I don't expect the  2017 BBC adaption of his Decline and Fall, streaming on Amazon Prime, to have any gay characters. 

Or maybe not.  Waugh derived the title and central theme from The Decline and Fall of the West, by Otto Spengler, which theorizes that societies inevitably decline into moral decadence.  Including LGBT people.  So maybe there will be some homophobia.

Scene 1: The Bollinger Club at Scone College, Oxford -- har, har -- is trashing their common room.  Meanwhile, quiet theology student Paul Pennyfeather  (Jack Whitehall, top photo) is sitting quietly with his friend Potts (Matthew Beard, left), who wants to go to a church tomorrow and "make some rubbings."  He means rubbings of tombstones, but...har, har.  Paul refuses, whereupon the friend says "I'll make some rubbings for you."  I'll bet you will...

On his way home, Paul runs afoul of the Bollinger Club, who strip him naked and force him to run across the quad.  Although he is not responsible, he is expelled from Oxford for "moral malfeasance."  

Scene 2: Generally men sent down for moral failings become schoolmasters, and there's a position available in Llanaba, Wales, to teach English, French, German, Latin, and coach cricket.  Paul doesn't speak German, but the job agent tells him to fake it.

Scene 3: Paul arrives at Llanaba, finds his way to the school, which is actually quite ornate, and is introduced to Captain Grimes (Douglas Hodge),  just as he is disciplining a student for whistling.  The other students were whistling, too, but "it makes no difference."  He gets 100 lines, and next time a beating. 

Then the Headmaster  and his daughters, whom Paul snubs.  Not into girls, are you?  He's in charge of the fifth form (15-16 year olds), games, carpentry,  and fire drill, and he'll be giving Best-Chedwyth organ lessons.  "But I don't play the organ."  "You do now."

Scene 4: The shabby Fifth Form classroom.  Headmaster advises Paul not to mention why he was sent down, and rushes away.. The students make fun of "Good morning" and role call, lock his desk drawer, and give him trick chalk. 

Scene 5: After the first class debacle, he rushes to the common room, and meets the hard-drinking Prendergast:  "You'll hate it here.  I do.  We all do."  Then to his room to unpack his stuff and be depressed.

Cut to dinner: teachers have to eat with their students. Paul is still depressed, the students still disrespectful, the food greenish slop.  

Afterwards, Captain Grimes escorts him to the pub. They discuss the Headmaster's two daughters; Grimes is engaged to "the haybale," leaving "the male one" for Paul.

About the Fifth Formers: Don't try to teach them anything, just keep them quiet and beat them.  Grimes isn't cut out for teaching; he keeps getting sacked at private schools for "doing things," but fortunately he's a public school alumnus so he always gets another job. In Britain, "public schools" are like the private schools in America.  

During the War, he "did something" that almost resulted in a firing squad, but because he was a public school alumnus, they just transfered him to Ireland, where you can "do things" without penalty.  Same-sex acts?  But they wouldn't get you a death sentence in Britain at the time

The leering Philbrick (Stephen Graham, left) approaches and asks if either of them would fancy a woman tonight. You got any men? They refuse.  Grimes says that he doesn't really fancy women.

More after the break

Poltergeist, the Gay Connection: Gay actors, skeletons, AIDS awareness, some dicks, and "They're he-ee-ere"

This week for Movie Night we saw Poltergeist, 1982. which I saw sometime in the 1990s, when you still rented movies at Blockbuster. After so many years, the plot was still familiar, although I forgot a few details, like the last 20 minutes.

You know the plot:  the five-year old Carol Ann talks to "tv people," and one day they burst out of the tv set to the iconic line "They're he-ee-eere."  After some relatively harmless poltergeist activity, she is swallowed into a vortex that opened in her bedroom closet,  occupied by lost souls and a malevolent presence.  The family brings in psychic investigators to help, but things only get worse. Finally they call in diminuitive firecracker psychic Zelda Rubenstein, who sends Mom into the vortex to get Carol Ann back.

Little does she know. Afterwards the stupid family plans to move, but they stick around for a few days so Mom can take a gratuitous-nudity bath, and move Carol Ann and her brother back into the room with the vortex-closet!  It opens again, the malevolent force is stronger, and skeletons start popping up out of the ground.  

Turns out that the evil corporate guy built the housing development on a cemetery.  He moved the headstones, but not the bodies! The souls aren't lost, they're angry over being disturbed!

Finally the whole house implodes.  The family escapes through a maze of coffins and skeletons, drives to a Holiday Inn, and in a kicker, ejects the television set from their room.

The gender-polarized, heterosexual nuclear family myth is pushed as blatantly as the roomful of Star Wars merch that executive producer Steven Spielberg ordered, or the book about Ronald Reagan that Dad reads in bed.  And it only gets worse.

Dad Craig T. Nelson went on to star in Coach, which lasted for nine seasons.  In a 1991 episode, Coach discovers that one of his football players is gay, and is shocked, dismayed, angry, and finally accepting, the standard "friend/brother/ coworker comes out" plotline of the era.

Oliver Robins, who plays the 10 year old son, went on to write and direct heterosexual sleaze such as Dumped and Wild Roommates.

But there is also a critique of the heterosexual nuclear family myth.  The suburb, meant to be bucolic, actually looks awful, little houses "made of ticky-tacky," and it is literally built on the dead -- the bodies of the marginalized and oppressed, the racial minorities, the poor, the LGBT people who are excluded from "Paradise."

The housing development is named "Cuesta Verde," which sounds nice, but "cuesta" means "cost, price."  The price you pay for your cushy suburban lifestyle.

And there are some gay connections.

1. Dirk Blocker, son of Bonanza famed Dan Blocker, plays a benevolent neighbor.  He went on to star in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which has a gay character.

2. Max Casella plays Marty, in the first trio of paranormal investigators.  He tries to enter the vortex room and gets bit -- rather a bad injury, but he sticks around through the night anyway.  Hungry, he goes into the kitchen and lays a raw steak on the counter -- not even on a plate -- but it gets all maggoty, and his face comes off. It's just a vision, but he's heading for the door...

Poltergeist was the 22-year old Cal Arts grad's first on-screen role.  During the 1980s, he had a few guest spots, playing a yuppie, a lawyer, and a cop, but he was mostly involved in a theater company that he started with some fellow CalArtians. 

He notes that "we hung out, had fun.  We all used to smile a lot more."  West Hollywood in the 80s and 90s, when everything was bright and new, and magical.  The best of times.  

 

In 1993 Martin moved to New York to continue his playwright career.  He and his brother Matt wrote the book on Paper Moon, starring hunk Gregory Harrison -- seen here nude in The Harrad Experiment 

More after the break

Jamar Pusch: A lot of biceps and bulges, an occasional dick.

 

A poster on the Brock O'Hurn fan board asked if we were familiar Jamar Pusch: "A top predator for sure."  I wasn't, but I soon got an eyeful: he has enormous quads and delts, moderately ripped abs, and the biggest pecs in bodybuilding history.  The measurements don't seem to be available online, but they have to surpass Arnold Schwarzenegger's 54"   Back when I was a gym rat, I topped out at 48"

Ok, now they've crossed the border into grotesque.  You look like you have boobs, dude.

Jamar is very active on social media. His Instagram, tagged, "King of Pecs," has 757,000 followers

He has several Facebook pages.  The biggest, tagged "Tell me the power of a man," has 121,000 members.

Plus Tiktok videos with 2.8 million views, Youtube videos with 280,000 views, X posts, and no doubt some social media platforms that I'm too old to know about. 

But they're all bicep-flexing and pec-bouncing.  Every one. No travel, no food, no friends, no family, nothing about his life outside the gym.

This was the only picture with an interesting background.  Otherwise it's just his muscles, with an occasional bulge or dick.

Only one website revealed any biographical details: He was born in Hamburg, Germany, on July 6th, 1996, Presumably his ancestry is Indian or Pakistani.  He began training in 2012: this photo shows his development between age 13 and 20

Nor is he listed on the Internet Movie Database, the Broadway Database, male model directories, bodybuilder directories...he doesn't appear to do anything professionally that would involve his face or physique. 

He has two or three porn clips,but not enough to suggest a porn career, or to determine if he is gay or straight.   He doesn't appear to do anything professionally that would involve his penis, either. 

I think he monetizes subscriptions to his videos.

More after the break

Christopher George: Soldier, cowboy, spy, warlock, Hugh Hefner, and nude model. Is there a gay connection?

When Christopher George posed for Playgirl, in June 1974, he was 43 years old and a Hollywood veteran, famous for Rat Patrol and about 50 gung-ho, "can we win this time?" war and cowboy movies.

He reclines, eating watermelon, a little paunchy in middle age, but hirsute, tanned, gold-chained, the sharp phallic knife accentuating his obvious gifts beneath the belt.

IMDB calls him a "solidly built, boyishly handsome leading man."  He was born in 1931 to Greek immigrants, and didn't learn English until he was six years old.  In high school in Miami, he played football, soccer, and track, drove trucks, and shot alligators.  

He was planning to become a Greek Orthodox priest, but in 1948 he dropped out of high school to join the Marines, and got the acting bug.  While waiting for his break, he held a variety of macho jobs, like bouncer, private investigator, and owner of a beer bar.  He started on the stage, roles in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Mr. Roberts, The Moon is Blue, and Stalag 17.

In 1965, he got a guest spot on Bewitched as George the Warlock, a Hugh Hefner-like playboy with a harem of women. Endora hires to seduce Samantha, but he likes her attractive neighbor more. 

He was also cast in In Harm's Way. with John Wayne as a naval officer who wants to beat the Japanese during World War II.  The two shared a gung-ho, macho philosophy, and became lifelong friends.Lots of rough, true-grit war and cowboy movies, flag-waving reactions to the pot-smoking, draft-card-burning, "can't tell the boys from the girls" hippies: Massacre Harber, The Thousand Plane Raid, The Devil's 8, Midway, Mayday at 40,000 Feet!

In Project X, 1968, Christopher plays a spy whose memories of a top-secret Commie weapon are being suppressed, so the good guys use advanced technology to extract them.  He has sex with the naked lady on the movie poster.

Christopher also did some modeling.  That's how he met Lynda Day, who became famous for her work on Mission Impossible and her Playboy centerfold.  They were married in 1970.

A heavy drinker and smoker throughout his life, Christopher died of a heart attack on November 28, 1983.  He received a Greek Orthodox funeral. In 2009, the Marines flew a flag at the Iwo Jima memorial

Is there any gay potential to such an indefatigably macho, hetero-horny, beefy, boyishly handsome Hugh Hefner?

Answer after the break

Dead Boy Detectives: Ghost buddies, one gay, one bi, solve afterlife mysteries. With Luke Gage and WW1 soldier bonus

 

A growling, snarling World War I soldier -- played by Chris Pereira -- chases two teenage ghosts through the British Museum.  The intellectual Edwin surmises that his gas mask is cursed: they'll have to destroy it to restore him to wholeness, so he can go on to the afterlife.  They'll need the Minor Arcana, Volume 4, but the athletic Charles can't find it in his magic bookbag.  

With the ghost-monster in hot pursuit, they run through a mirror, but end up in a hotel, not back in the office.  Edwin explains that it's hard to locate the right mirror-dimension when you're being chased by a gas mask monster.  

Flashback to the Dead Boy Detectives office a few days ago: A World War I nurse explains that she's been hanging aroud the British Museum long after her death to help the many lost souls from her era enter the afterlife.  But one has been cursed and turned into a monster.  She hires the boys to help him.

Left: Chris's butt

Back in the present, the boys rush through the hotel, find another mirror, and end up in their office.  The monster follows!   Charles manages to tear his gas mask off -- the snarling monster underneath spews blood all over and tries to stab him. Meanwhile Edwin finds the right book, says the incantation, and the gas mask bursts into flames.  Back in human form, the ghost is calm, but confused.  The boys tell him that he 's dead, still fighting a war that ended over 100 years ago. 

Left: Chris's cock.  I know he only appears in this episode, but where else are you going to see it?

Uh-oh, Death is coming to guide him to the afterlife.  The boys have to hide, or she'll take them, too!

That's a lot of world-building in five minutes, but it comes while the boys are being chased, assaulted, threatened, and zapped about, so it goes down easily.  

The Dead Boy Detectives, a paranormal take on the common British "boy detective" genre, appeared in a number of comics and limited edition graphic novels during the 1990s and 2000s, all taking place in Neil Gaiman's Sandman universe.  Edwin, the intellectual one, died in 1916, when some boarding school bullies tried to scare him by pretending to offer him as a sacrifice to Satan.  The spell worked, and he was sent to hell.  

He stayed until 1989, when some of the residents of hell escaped and laid waste to a boarding school. The athletic Charles was killed in the ruckus.  He would be going to the Sandman-world version of Heaven, but he decided to wait and hang out with his new ghost-buddy.  Now they are detectives, helping lost souls with unfinished business, lost memories, or curses that prevent them from moving on. They must keep a low profile and not perform much magic, to avoid detection from Death and an afterlife "Missing Souls" bureacracy.

Spoiler alert: In the comics, Edwin is gay, and Charles is bisexual.  They don't date each other, however: who said any two random gay/queer dudes must automatically be into each other? 

I watched the first episode of the tv series to see if the pair, now played by the considerably older George Rexstrew and Jayden Revri, were heterosexualized.

The answer after the break